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Friday, June 28, 2013

The day's fun began with a yummy lunch at the Main Street Ice Cream Parlor, just a short distance from both the school where I used to teach, and our lakeside 'camp'. I was there with two friends/former colleagues: the wonderful high school art teacher (she's the leg on the left) and 'C' (the leg on the right), former 4th grade teacher and current middle school math teacher who you learned about in our prior adventures with henna, here, and here, and here. Obviously, I am the leg in the middle on the top photo.

Once lunch was done, we headed to the lake, where we spent the afternoon
on the dock, sitting in the sunshine, sipping wine, painting our feet
and legs with henna. Does it get any better than this?

Somehow a little henna also landed on my arm. There has to be a dragonfly somewhere, right?

And of course I took a few minutes to play around with some of the special settings on my camera.

We will definitely have another henna-by-the-lake session again soon! Only next time we will use some NEW henna, so that the color will 'take' better. (My leg designs are a faded orange-brown color today, which doesn't show up well at all on my tan leg. My foot looks a bit better, with the color a bit richer. We need a new batch of henna!)

Saturday, June 22, 2013

If you've read my blog for a while, you know that sunny weather means I'll likely be at our Adirondack lakeside 'camp', paddling my kayak to the marsh at the north end of the lake, and that I'll post take lots of marsh photos and post them here instead of art lessons. So that's what I did on Wednesday in the late afternoon sunshine (I went paddling with my Nikon along for the ride). Usually, a paddle to the marsh means sightings of turtles, spider webs jeweled with dew, assorted water fowl, and waterlilies. So when, from a distance, I saw what appeared to be an unusual knotted branch or maybe a vine on a branch on a little bush growing on a mound in the marsh, I had to go closer to see what it was. And when I got there, here, my friends, is what I saw:

I know.. a lot of pics of the same thing... but really, how could I resist?! t is either a northern water snake(non-poisonous venom, but it's saliva contains an anticoagulant that makes its bites bleed like crazy; I found this out through research after I returned home) or maybe it is a timber rattlesnake (which, also through after-the-fact research, I discovered does indeed swim). Egads!

My hubby thought perhaps someone was playing a prank, winding a toy rattlesnake around a branch to scare someone gullible like me. I thought he was full of ****, since I almost NEVER see anyone else kayaking way in the deep back end of the marsh, and because all the stumps and rocks and muck and shallow water in the marsh make it pretty impossible to get close enough to do something like that.

So I set out to prove him wrong. If the next day the snake was still there, in the same place, I was a victim of a hoax. If it was gone, we'd know it was real and alive. I tried to convince him to hop in his canoe and come with me, but he wanted no part of this excursion. So midday on a bright Thursday, I paddled my way back to the marsh. There were dozens of geese. There were hundreds of dragonflies flitting around everywhere. Bullfrogs were singing in chorus. I saw a turtle plop into the water. I saw fish jumping. I saw water bugs skating. I even saw a great blue heron take off and fly over the marsh. (Simply lovely; amazing.) It was a glorious beautiful day, and I searched every outcropping, every mound, every stump. The snake was gone, which of course means it was the real thing.

Geese in the marsh

The snake was way in the back of the area of this photo

Marsh driftwood

On my way out - toward the mouth of the marsh

I often go into places in the marsh where I cannot be seen, winding my way between the tall grasses. My cell phone gets no reception in the marsh. Sometimes I get a little stuck, and get nervous that I won't be able to back myself out, or that my paddle will get stuck in the muck, or that a snapping turtle will jump in my kayak and eat me (I've never actually seen a snapping turtle), or that geese will attack me (truth is, they either honk loudly at me in chorus, or freeze and pretend they are invisible, or quietly swim away while my head is turned), or that a jumping fish will land in my kayak and I'll freak out and flip over with my Nikon still around my neck. But I never ever thought about snakes in the marsh!

Any snake experts out there that can confirm the type of snake from my photos? Unfortunately the body was wrapped over the end of the tail, so it's hard to tell if there is a rattle or not...

Meanwhile, I'm saving money to buy a longer lens for my camera, so I don't have to get so close next time!!

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

I've been involved in some discussions in an art teachers' group on Facebook, and a recent discussion prompted me to write this post. I was asked about my curriculum. So today, I'm going to share my personal philosophy of teaching art, with a rundown of the way I ran my program until my retirement. It's not so much a curriculum as it is an overview, a general plan. If you are a long-time reader of this blog, you probably already know a lot about this. But if you you have recently found your way here by way of the Facebook group, or Pinterest, or an Internet search, there's a lot you don't know about me and my teaching style.*By the way, I am filling this post with a random smattering of student artwork. It will not always match the text. I just want you to see the type of stuff my kids might have done in my program.

4th grade room design construction

So, some background. (Feel free to skip this paragraph if you are not interested.) I am one-year retired, after 36 years teaching. I began as a high school art and photography teacher, but spent the last 27 years in the district that I retired from, teaching elementary and some middle level art. This job was in a small rural school district in northern NY, about 500 kids in the whole district. For the first 14 or so years in this job, I taught in two buildings, in two tiny towns. When I began, my classrooms were either nonexistent or inappropriate, and shared. It was not ideal, but I did not let it hinder the creation of art. Then my district got some funding and abandoned their three inadequate schools and built a central Pre-K-12 building. The high school art teacher and I suggested that our rooms be central to the building and adjoining, so that we could share expertise. Instead, we were placed at the extreme opposite reaches of the large building. Our schedules didn't jive, so we never saw each other. In other words, my art program existed as an island, and I was really on my own for deciding what to teach and why. Until I began blogging three years ago, my only contact with other art teachers was, for the most part, my attendance at annual conferences. So I figured things out for myself.

Andy Warhol inspired cat paintings, grade 3

I have an extreme distaste for jargon. Giving things fancy names doesn't validate anything for me. And frankly, I learned very little jargon in my hippy-dippy college education in the early 1970's. Over the years, I have seen all sorts of initiatives come and go. There have been been local and statewide and national regulations and programs. There have been professional development programs in my district, where the 'specials' teachers were practically ignored. There was the NY State Regents Action Plan of the 80's. In the 90's nationally there was Goals 2000. Locally there was Learning Focused Schools. And of course, No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and now the Common Core. After seeing so many changes come and go over the years, I am always skeptical about investing too much in a new initiative, since in a few years something else will come along. But while I miss my students, quite frankly I'm happy I retired before I had to deal with the new direction in education, which seems to spend way too much time devoted to assessing and assembling data and less time for the joy of actually teaching and learning. This one seems like it might stick around. Anyhow...

Here's what I believe:I believe that art class should be a hands-on opportunity for kids. If you are afraid of making a mess you should not be an art teacher. The good thing, of course, is that you will have less behavior problems if your kids are actively engaged in hands-on experiences. Don't give up those messy materials for something easy to clean up due to lack of space, time, or energy. You are cheating the kids.

I do not like the idea of spending elementary art class time giving tests. I also have no interest in learning about incorporating iPads or other technology into elementary art programs. The kids spend so much of their time now, both in school and at home, in front of a screen, using some sort of technology. So I believe an elementary art program should be the one guaranteed opportunity during the day for tactile experience. I want students to experience dipping a brush into thick creamy paint, squishing their fingers through clay or papier-mache goo, squeezing Elmer's Glue-All out of a bottle, cutting, tearing, weaving, drawing, painting, and creating.

expressing emotion with thought bubbles

Rizzi cars!

6th grade Blue Willow inspired plate design

leftovers mask

coffee filter creation

no explanation needed!

By the time they left my program, I wanted my students to have experienced drawing, painting, collage, printmaking, cutting, gluing, weaving, constructing, and more. I want them to learn to use their eyes and their imaginations, to find creative solutions to challenges, and make independent decisions. I wanted to expose them to a variety of well-known artists, art trends, and cultures. I wanted them to learn to appropriately use and clean up art materials responsibly, and be good class citizens. And certainly I wanted them to have an understanding of how to use line, shape, color, etc effectively in their artwork.

4th graders learn to use charcoals and draw trees

I had a NO WHINING, NO COMPLAINING policy in my room; the art room should be a happy place. I wanted and had a program flexible enough to change directions for something exciting, a spontaneous learning experience.

As for specific curriculum - what I actually taught - I do need to say it varied from year to year.

I did not drill the Elements and Principles of Art (though posters hung on my bulletin board all year and were frequently referred to), but instead incorporated them into every lesson. I think it is more important for kids to understand how to use line and color and texture, for example, than to memorize facts, though vocabulary was added to my word wall all year. I found that almost every art project uses more than one or two elements, so to say "this is a line project" is kind of limiting. Perhaps we are using line to create the illusion of space, using line to create shape, using line to establish rhythm or movement... Perhaps the color of the line is significant. Perhaps the lines you are using create value and texture... you get the idea, right?

I also introduced students to the work of 'famous artists' and art movements and incorporated these into projects throughout the year. I kept careful track of the artists I introduced, and varied them from year to year so that we could study one artist across several grade levels. One year might be VanGogh, Mondrian, Cassatt, and Jackson Pollock; the next could be Chihuly, Rizzi, Lichtenstein, and Janet Fish; and the next might be Nevelson, Matisse, Klimt, and Frank Lloyd Wright; and the next could be Arcimboldo, Kandinsky, Warhol, and Grandma Moses; and so on. Sometimes artists/styles were displayed and studied together - such as Dali and Magritte. Or perhaps I might display landscapes/seascapes by Cezanne, and Monet, and Winslow Homer. Or self-portraits by everyone from vanGogh to Rembrandt to Suzanne Valadon. Or we might compare/contrast Frank Lloyd Wright with Victorian architecture.

Matisse-inspired painting/collage

a little art room cleanup!

1st grade Matisse inspired painted collages

3rd grade drawings

1st grade family portrait

Pinwheels for Peace installation

All grade levels used a variety of materials and created both 2-D and 3-D art every year. For storage purposes, I 'choreographed' the 3-D projects so they did not happen all at once. I did papier-mache with grades 3-5 every year, though I rotated the projects so I wasn't doing the same thing each year. My 6th graders always did some sculptural project with plaster bandage. (I saved the more pricey materials, such as the plaster bandage and tooling foil for the 6th grade, who were my oldest students in recent years.) I only had air dry clay, so I used it just with the younger grades. Certain 3-D projects came to be expected every year: My second graders always made cardboard 'teddy bear chairs', and my first graders made cardboard sculptures. 4th graders used shredded paper clay (messy! fun!) to create hunks of 'cave wall' when they learned about Lascaux and the origins of art.

papier-mache Darumas, Japanese inspiration

6th grade mummy cases with hieroglyphics

We often used other cultures for inspiration. The 6th grade academic curriculum in particular was easy to coordinate with - for example, we always did something Egypt-related.

paintings by grade 2

Every year, as much as possible all my students would use/experience:

Watercolors, tempera and acrylics. Painting would include using both traditional brushes, and non-traditional, such as Q-tips, cardboard scrapers, fingers, squirt bottles, rollers, etc.

Grades 3 and up were exposed to perspective, with the understanding and challenge of what we did a little more complex each year.

Drawing from life - whether it was 1st graders 'modeling' for the class to draw, or the time we brought in animals (a parent did taxidermy), or a still life setup, or contour drawing from objects in the room; I much rather kids draw from life than copy photos when possible.

toothpaste batik in process

reflections

making 'rock' for cave wall paintings

grade 1 - 'I have a little shadow'

kindergarten collage

While I am not going to go into detail, I had (have) a document that details 'exit goals' - so that students leaving my programs at the end of grade 6 would be expected to have experienced. everything on my list.

6th grade altered book

I tried to foster independence in my classroom, and have students 'take ownership' of their work, their behavior, and the care of my room and materials. I did not use templates, except rare instances. (A circle tracer would be acceptable, for example.) To me, by having everyone trace a template so that 'everyone's work turns out good' takes ownership from the student. He is more likely to say 'I can't draw a cat' for example, if every time you draw cats in the art room you give him one to trace! Instead, give him the experience/tools/practice to learn to draw that cat on his own, and he'll take ownership of and be more proud of his work. Does this make sense to you? My goal isn't simply to have the students create a nice product, but to give them the tools to use their own decision-making and make a product that they really 'own'.

kindergarten pinch pots

from the Salvador Deli

cave wall hunk

papier-mache garden gnomes, grade 3

toothpaste batik

collaborative Pollock painting

silly kids

shaving cream!

4th grade cardboard crooked houses

Hubby is waiting for me to go somewhere - gotta run! I hope this post isn't too long and convoluted! And I hope I finished it! Let me know if you have questions about particular artwork posted, or anything else!

About Me

Hi, I'm Phyl and after 36 years as an art teacher, I am now officially retired, but that doesn't mean I'm done with art education. The truth is, I'm more involved now than ever before! I hope you'll visit me often as I share art lesson ideas, thoughts on art education, my own personal artistic and photographic endeavors, and tidbits about my family and the beautiful environment where we live.